New on OnlySky: The future of food

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of food, and a new technology called precision fermentation that’s going to transform it.

Humans have been taking advantage of natural fermentation for thousands of years. We enlist microbes such as yeast and bacteria, feeding them sugar and other molecules that they like. In exchange, they make molecules that we like, such as alcohol. More recently, we’ve genetically altered some microbes to produce expensive special-purpose drugs that are hard to make in any other way.

However, the advent of newer, more powerful genetic engineering technologies is making it downright easy to custom-tailor microbes to churn out almost any product we want. What will happen when we can make milk without cows, eggs without chickens, meaty proteins without livestock – or brand-new foodstuffs never before seen in nature?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

Traditional cheesemaking relies on a substance called rennet, which curdles milk so it can be separated into curds and whey. In the past, rennet was harvested from the stomachs of calves. However, since the 1990s, rennet (technically, its key enzyme, chymosin) has been made by yeast. Nearly all hard cheese is made this way.

The first use of precision fermentation is even older. In 1982, the FDA approved insulin produced by bacteria. This breakthrough replaced the old method of purifying insulin from cow and pig pancreases.

In the past, creating a genetically engineered organism was laborious and expensive. Insulin, rennet and the like were ideal because they’re high-value products only needed in small quantities.

However, new technologies like CRISPR have made genetic engineering almost trivially easy. With this power, we’re about to see an explosion of new uses. Some of them may soon be on supermarket shelves.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Worthless yellow rocks

A stack of gleaming gold ingots

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Among the possessions of murder victim Vaughn Meiss, Win Bear spots something unusual:

The ambulance was ready to take our client to the taxidermists downtown. One of the techs passed by with a collection of plastic baggies containing personal effects. “Hold on. Let me see that.” He handed over a bright golden disk, larger than the silver dollars I remembered from childhood, in deep relief a picture of a bald-headed old coot with ruffles at his throat:

ALBERT GALLATIN
1761 C.E.-A.L. 76
REVOLUTIONIST, PRESIDENT, SCHOLAR OF LIBERTY

On the other side, an old-fashioned hillbilly whiskey jug, and forest-covered hills behind:

ONE METRIC OUNCE
GOLD 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, L.T.D.

Win is puzzling over the strange coin and the unfamiliar dating system it bears when he’s interrupted by Oscar Burgess, the state security thug mentioned last week. Burgess doesn’t hesitate to pull rank, announcing that he’s taking over the investigation, which Win finds suspicious:

“What brings SecPol into a simple street killing, Burgess?”

… “You ought to know better than to ask foolish questions. We’re thinking about preempting this case – National Security. When the papers come through, you’ll have to turn everything over to us and go back to busting jaywalkers.” He grinned and watched his men confronting mine, knuckles white on holstered pistol grips all around.

“Didn’t realize there was a full moon last night, Oscar,” I said. He turned back, puzzled. I pointed to a tiny cut on his pockmarked forehead, dried blood at the edges. “Cut yourself shaving?”

He whitened. “Mind your own stinking business, Bear, or I’ll have you back working curfew violations!”

This, of course, is the injury that Win infers Meiss’ killer must have suffered. The book all but shouts it, so it’s not a spoiler to say that Burgess is the killer.

The reason he murdered Meiss, rather than arresting him, won’t be revealed until later. However, it has no meaningful impact on the plot, so I’ll spoil it here: Burgess has gone rogue. He’s running his own scheme on the side that he doesn’t want his superiors to know about yet.

After delivering the stock “you’re off the case” message, Burgess storms out. Win holds onto the coin, spitefully resolving to pursue the investigation on his own:

I signed six different forms and took the coin, to be surrendered at Properties tomorrow, on pain of pain. Eventually it would wind up in some bureaucrat’s pocket, or melted down to feed a multi-quadrillion neobuck federal deficit. Probably the former.

This is another detail that’s only vaguely sketched in, but it seems that in this dystopia, individual possession of gold has been outlawed. Win narrates: “Gold, legally kosher a few brief years ago, was presently hotter than vitamin C”.

This is reminiscent of when FDR made it illegal to own gold in 1933. It was a first step toward getting the U.S. off the gold standard, which was strangling economic recovery and prolonging the Great Depression. As long as the government was constrained by the requirement to be able to redeem dollars for gold, it was hobbled in what actions it could take. It was an arbitrary and artificial limit on the money supply that led to a deflationary spiral.

When the dollar was no longer tied to a finite gold reserve, the government could issue debt to pay for New Deal social programs, kickstarting the economy and ending the depression. The plan worked as intended, but despite its success – or more likely because of its success – libertarians and other goldbugs are still mad about it. They believe that the confiscation of gold inaugurated an era of government tyranny. There’s an echo of that reaction in this book.

The unusual thing is that unlike Ayn Rand, who declared that gold was “the objective value”, Smith doesn’t believe gold has any exalted metaphysical status. In his utopia, there are competing private currencies backed by commodities like wheat, iron, even whiskey. This is a consistent application of his anarchist politics.

But in spite of this, he persists in treating gold as specially significant. It’s no coincidence that the first big clue is a gold coin from another world (rather than, say, a paper banknote). It’s also not by chance that Smith’s tyrannical government hoards gold as part of its program of social control.

Libertarians have always assigned a talismanic, almost religious status to gold. They believe it’s “real” money in a way that fiat currency isn’t. Gold fever is so common among Smith’s ideological confreres, it seems he’s unconsciously adopted the same attitude, even though his philosophy doesn’t require him to. It’s almost like a vestigial trait.

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New on OnlySky: The benefits of disconnecting

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how the internet has made everyone connected all the time, and why we may want to think about reversing that trend.

Thanks to computers in every home, smartphones in our pockets, smart-home appliances, and networked cars, the average middle-class Westerner spends their life at the center of a digital spiderweb of connectivity. But it seems clear that all this information hasn’t improved our lives – just the opposite. It’s fed toxic rivers of misinformation, bolstered an unsustainable always-on work culture, and made us isolated, anxious and depressed.

If ubiquitous connectivity is the problem, disconnection could be the solution. If we deliberately went offline more often, would it make our lives better?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

This is more stimulation than our brains evolved to cope with.

For most of our species’ history, communities were small and local, and life moved at the slower pace of nature. Now news is deluging us faster than ever, as if everyone needed to know everything happening all over the world in real time. It’s no wonder so many of us feel stressed and overwhelmed. We don’t have the bandwidth!

There is a persistent misconception that more information naturally and automatically leads to truth and progress. Ignorance results from not enough information, goes the thinking. Increase the information and you increase understanding of the truth. This misconception is most prevalent among those with advanced education — those whose exposure to more information led (in their view) to more truth.

But this assumption of the automatic benefit of more information is demonstrably false.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Corpus delicti

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Lieutenant Win Bear’s brooding is interrupted by a priority call:

“Five Charlie Nineteen, respond Code Three, possible homicide, southwest corner of Sixteenth and Gaylord.”

…I threw the papers on the backseat and started the engine. It coughed asthmatically and a surge of adrenalin washed through me as it caught.

…Four scuffed black-and-whites straddled the street, their lightbars blinking round and round by a littered curb fronting a crumbling neighborhood mosque that had seen previous duty as a Mexican Catholic church.

…A body lay half-propped against the wall, blood streaming across cracked cement into the gutter. “What do we have here?” I asked the patrol sergeant. “Another VN-Arab rumble?” He shook his head and I remembered with embarrassment that he was an Arab himself. “Sorry, Moghrabi – just a bad day today.”

This is the kind of interesting small detail that, alas, never gets any followup. Are we supposed to view this in a positive light, that society has become more diverse and multicultural despite government oppression? Or are we meant to infer – as many Christian nationalists and white supremacists fear – that one reason for this dystopian world is that Christianity has faded away and Muslim immigrants have “taken over” the country?

Win’s courteous treatment of an Arab officer suggests that Smith wasn’t trying to portray non-white cultures negatively. Then again, every racist boasts about having a minority friend who’s one of the good ones.

Police technicians are examining the body of the victim, who was killed in a drive-by shooting:

The victim – late twenties – lay clutching his middle, as if to keep his guts from falling out. He had good reason to try, stitched from hip to shoulder the way he was. A gap in the closely grouped pockmarks on the wall above said he had fallen where he’d been shot. In one outstretched hand was a stainless-steel snubbie. No punk’s gun, anyway. A Bianchi holster identical to mine was exposed by his blood-soaked jacket.

Win inspects the gun in the dead man’s hand. He shot back at whoever attacked him, but doesn’t seem to have killed anyone:

I got an okay from the video techs, bent over the body, and gently pried the revolver from its stiffening fingers. Ruger Security Six, like I’d figured. I opened the cylinder; dimples in four of the primers twinkled up at me. Four shots fired, Norma .357 hollowpoints. If any had connected, we’d be finding another corpse, possibly in worse shape than this one.

However, he notices broken glass in the street, and some of the shards have blood on them. He tells the officers that whatever car the fatal shots were fired from, it will have broken windows and the shooter will be injured.

As for the victim:

His travel permit said he was one Meiss, Vaughn L., from Fort Collins, sixty miles to the north. His work assignment: Colorado State University. As a Ph.D. on the Physics faculty, he rated his own wheels and the fuel to roll them.

Travel permits are standard dystopian stuff. What I find interesting is the implication is that scientists are given privileges not available to the rest of the population.

What kind of dystopia is this, anyway? Is it a plain military dictatorship where the government rules by force, with no aim beyond perpetuating itself? Or is it an elitist technocracy run by intellectuals and academics?

Yet again, Smith spends very little time answering these questions. We’re soon to be whisked out of this world, never to return. I don’t think it’s a leap to guess that, because he was opposed to all government on principle, he was uninterested in the distinctions among them and how one kind might be better or worse than another.

As Win is inspecting the crime scene, he hears a familiar – and unwelcome – voice:

I turned resignedly to confront Oscar Burgess, several years my senior and small-arms instructor during my academy days. While I had slogged from rookie to patrolman, from investigator to homicide lieutenant, he’d left CLETA for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms during its heyday in the early eighties, and now was Denver station chief for the Federal Security Police.

The years had only refined our mutual distaste. Where I was… let’s say “heavy set,” he was gray and lean, cat-fast, with a frightening moon-map of a face, the hideous legacy of minipox. Behind him, his crew in fresh-creased jumpsuits brandished automatic shotguns. Their unit crest was emblazoned on the side of a black and scarlet van: a mailed fist grasping the naked edges of a dagger, blood creeping out between the fingers.

No prize is awarded for guessing that Burgess is a villain. What’s more worthy of note is Smith’s offhand mention of his scarred face and a disease called minipox. (Does he think socialism creates disease?)

When this book was written, novel pandemics were a distant memory. Ideologues of all kinds could proclaim what they’d do in case of a deadly new disease, safe in the confidence that their theories would never be put to the test. Unfortunately, all of us who lived through 2020 now have hard-won experience of what works and what doesn’t.

At the beginning of COVID-19, our only weapon against the virus was lockdowns. Governments around the world told citizens to stay at home; to close nonessential businesses; to restrict visitors at hospitals and nursing homes; to skip travel, wear masks, practice social distancing, and meet outdoors. All these measures were intended to slow the spread of the virus so that scientists would have time to create treatments.

As unpopular as the lockdowns were, they worked. They didn’t stop the virus entirely – COVID was too contagious for that – but they saved thousands of vulnerable people. They bought precious time for us to figure out how to treat the sick and, ultimately, to create vaccines. (A strong line of evidence for lockdowns is that one strain of flu virus went extinct because of them.)

The alternative was letting the virus rip, which would’ve resulted in a tsunami of infection where everyone got sick all at once. That would have been a much bigger catastrophe. It would have overwhelmed hospitals, leading to the collapse of health systems and the deaths of many people who could have been saved if they’d gotten medical attention.

How would an anarcho-libertarian world respond to a pandemic? The only option open to them would be the let-it-rip scenario. That would remain true even in case of a novel virus that was even deadlier or more debilitating than COVID. Are millions of deaths, widespread chaos and economies disintegrating just the price of freedom?

Pandemics are the essence of a collective-action problem. Viruses ignore the social constructs we invent to divide people; they cross property and class lines with impunity. We can only protect ourselves against collective threats by admitting that, sometimes, we have to accept temporary restrictions on liberty for the greater good. That may be quarantines to fight disease, or blackout orders in wartime, or mandatory evacuations in case of natural disaster. Either way, it’s a lesson that libertarians don’t want to learn.

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The old darkness returns

Transmission electron microscopic image of a measles virus

It was only a matter of time. In Texas, an unvaccinated six-year-old child has died of measles:

The Texas outbreak began in a small Mennonite community near Lubbock, home to 260,000, and has since spread. To date, there have been over 130 cases across Texas and New Mexico, with 18 patients hospitalised, local health officials said.

On Wednesday, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s newly confirmed top health official, called the Texas outbreak “not unusual”, a claim disputed by doctors and local residents.

This is the first measles death in the U.S. in ten years. And more may follow soon, because the outbreak isn’t under control yet. Over 130 cases have been reported so far, but since measles is devastatingly contagious, it’s a sure bet that the true number is much larger. Some of the sickened children were so ill that they had to be hospitalized:

Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that the patients who were hospitalized were admitted because they were having trouble breathing and needed supportive care such as supplemental oxygen.

…She added that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far. Several of those patients required intensive care. None of the hospitalized had been vaccinated against measles.

As a reminder, measles is far from harmless. 1 in 1,000 infected people will die, with children and infants at special risk. The virus can cause lethal pneumonia, or it can invade the brain, causing coma, permanent seizures, blindness or deafness. There’s also evidence that measles erases immune system memory, making survivors vulnerable to other diseases that they were previously immune to.

The epicenter of the measles outbreak is Gaines County, in rural western Texas. The county is home to a conservative Mennonite enclave, and it’s a hub for homeschooling and private religious schools. Almost one in six kids have skipped one or more vaccines. It’s the exact kind of place you’d expect a disease outbreak to strike first and hardest.

The last major measles outbreak in the U.S. was in 2019, in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in Rockland County, New York. You’d think that would remind people why vaccines are important. However, they tried their hardest to learn nothing from it, and they succeeded. Three years later in 2022, there was a polio outbreak in the same place.

There are similarities between the 2019 and 2022 outbreaks and this one. In all three cases, the biggest, most glaring commonality at the heart of the problem is religion.

Mennonites are a Protestant Christian denomination with historical ties to the Amish. Like ultra-Orthodox Jews, they have no specific religious beliefs against vaccination, but they tend to be isolationist, suspicious of the modern world, and resistant to secular education. This leaves them uninformed, undereducated and distrustful of vaccines, which makes their communities fertile ground for an extremely contagious virus to rip through.

This old darkness, long banished by science, is creeping back into the world. This measles outbreak can be laid squarely at the feet of anti-vaxxers and religious fundamentalists. These ancient scourges of humanity were finally under control, on the verge of being wiped out.

Thanks to the forces of unreason, we’re lowering our guard and they’re being allowed to return. It’s not a natural disaster beyond our control, but a completely unnecessary and self-inflicted betrayal. It’s like the palace guard unbarring the doors and ushering enemy invaders inside. Those who allowed this to happen, or encouraged it, deserve to be considered traitors to humankind.

Measles was the first, but more will come soon. This week, there was a case of rubella reported in Texas. Like measles, rubella is an airborne and highly contagious virus. It’s usually asymptomatic or mild in adults, but if a pregnant person contracts it, it causes devastating birth defects, miscarriage and stillbirth.

Fortunately, the rubella case turned out to be a false positive – this time. But since the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine has been a particular target of anti-vaxxers, wherever protection against one of these diseases is low, the others have an opening to return as well.

Thankfully, those of us who care about our kids’ lives and respect the authority of science can still get vaccinated. It won’t be as effective as if we had herd immunity, but MMR and other vaccines are highly protective on an individual level. That’s the good news. The bad news is that anti-vaxxers aren’t going away, and they don’t care who suffers and dies because of their bad counsel.

The Texas child who died of measles was the first, but won’t be the last. If we keep going the way we’re going now, over the next few years, these diseases will keep spreading and the deaths will multiply until they become routine. Before long, they’ll fade into the background noise, and people will shrug their shoulders in resignation. They’ll accept it as one more evil that no one can do anything about, the same way we as a society treat school shootings.

Image: Transmission electron microscopic image of a measles virus. Via CDC/Cynthia S. Goldsmith; William Bellini, Ph.D.

The Probability Broach: Blaming capitalism on socialism

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Lieutenant Edward “Win” Bear sits in his car, contemplating his life choices:

Twenty-seven years on the force, and now the pain was creeping down my left arm into the wrist. Maybe it was the crummy hours, the awful food. Maybe it was worrying all the time: cancer; minipox; encountering an old friend in a packet of blackmarket lunch meat…

Forty-eight was the right age to worry, though, especially for a cop. Oh, I’d tried keeping in shape: diets, exercise, vitamins before they got too risky. But after Evelyn had split, it just seemed like a lot of trouble.

Ayn Rand uses this same dishonest tactic: describing evils that exist because of unregulated capitalism, and blaming them on socialism. This is a case in point.

Smith expects us to believe that government regulation – not greed or the hunger for profit, not sloppiness or corner-cutting, not callous disregard for customers’ health, not relentless competitive pressure in a Prisoner’s Dilemma market – is what compels businesses to sell tainted vitamins and adulterated food.

This assertion runs smack into a wall of reality. When these kinds of scandals happened for real, it was because businesses were unregulated – not because regulation somehow forced them to do it. I’ll quote the famous passages from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about the American meatpacking industry:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white — it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

…and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

This stomach-churning description has a recent parallel, the 2024 listeria outbreak at a Boar’s Head meat-processing plant. When food safety inspectors checked the plant, they found mold, vermin and filth:

Between Aug. 1, 2023, and Aug. 2, 2024, inspectors found “heavy discolored meat buildup” and “meat overspray on walls and large pieces of meat on the floor.” They also documented flies “going in and out” of pickle vats and “black patches of mold” on a ceiling. One inspector detailed blood puddled on the floor and “a rancid smell in the cooler.” Plant staff were repeatedly notified that they had failed to meet requirements, the documents showed.

Needless to say, in an anarcho-libertarian world like the one Smith envisions, problems like this would be impossible to detect or do anything about. With no regulatory watchdog, there’d be no way to track outbreaks of foodborne disease. There would be nowhere to report them to, and no one whose job it was to connect the dots and figure out what all the sickened people were eating.

Even if you assume private parties would arise to perform this function, there’s another problem. In a world of absolute property rights, there would be no universal rule about what level of cleanliness was required. No business would be compelled to let anyone in to check if sanitation standards were being upheld. Nor would there be anyone with the authority to order a recall. True, a business might do it voluntarily to protect their reputation, but they’d have just as strong an incentive to deny or minimize the problem.

Lt. Bear continues his ruminations:

Maybe it was a depression they wouldn’t call by its right name, or seeing old folks begging in the streets. Maybe I just watched too many doctor shows.

Again, bear in mind that this is supposed to be a socialist dystopia, where the government exercises power over the economy. So why are there are so many homeless elderly begging on street corners? Are there no social safety nets, no public housing, no fiscal stimulus programs? Smith makes it sound like people are completely on their own, which is supposed to be what happens in major depressions in capitalist economies.

It would be one thing if Smith tried to make a case for how this all came about. But he doesn’t. Other than these brief asides, the book contains very little description and no backstory for Win Bear’s world.

For libertarians, it’s an article of faith that the government is the cause of every evil. They don’t view it as a policy position to be justified through argument, but a dogma, not to be doubted or questioned. They take this so thoroughly for granted, they tend to forget that not everyone else believes it.

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New on OnlySky: This too shall pass

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about an enduring consolation from the golden age of philosophy.

As the story goes, an ancient king asked his sages for wisdom that would be true and helpful in both good times and bad. The sages’ reply was: “This too shall pass.”

Like the Golden Rule, this is a maxim that doesn’t originate from just one culture. It’s been independently invented by people in various times and places. And like the Golden Rule, it’s stood the test of time because it’s a sound principle. It’s still relevant to us today, and it can bear us up in dark times if we let it. Remembering the transience of our circumstances is a valuable antidote both to hubris and to despair.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

In the depths of darkness, in times of ascendant fascism and societal disintegration, present bias leads us to despair. It seduces us into believing that that humans are inherently corrupt and evil and that the cause of progress is hopeless. It tells us that things will never change, so belief in a better tomorrow is foolish naivete.

In good times, too, present bias leads us astray. It’s one of the reasons why people don’t save for rainy days, why they’re not prepared for a layoff, a health crisis or any other unexpected blow. It’s why lottery winners blow through their fortunes, because they believe they’ll have limitless money forever.

On a larger scale, present bias is the reason liberal voters’ hopes end up dashed time and time again. We have a habit of getting too excited, hailing every progressive victory as the dawning of a new era of enlightenment. But history tends to move in cycles of advance and retrenchment. When the inevitable backlash appears and undoes some or all of what was achieved, it comes as a crushing disappointment, all the more so because it was unexpected.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Peak oil

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

It’s time to plunge into The Probability Broach. The opening narration tells us that it’s July 1987, in Denver, Colorado.

Every chapter opens with a fictitious quote setting the scene. Here’s how the first chapter begins:

…would cease operations early next month. In a joint press release, executives of the other networks regretted the passing of America’s oldest broadcasting corporation and pledged to use the assets awarded to them by the federal bankruptcy court to continue its tradition of operation “in the public interest.”

In a related story, TV schedules will be cut back by an additional two hours in eighty cities next week. Heads of the FCC and Department of Energy, officially unavailable for comment, unofficially denied rumors that broadcast cutbacks were related to recent media criticism of the President’s economic and energy policies.

—KOE Channel 4
Eyewitness News
Denver, July 6, 1987

As I mentioned earlier, Atlas Shrugged spends almost all its run time in the “regular” world, with just a brief sojourn in the capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch. The Probability Broach does the opposite. It starts out in the “regular” world, but spends only a short time there before switching tracks to its sci-fi libertarian utopia, the North American Confederacy, where it spends the rest of the story.

Both Ayn Rand and L. Neil Smith are trying to pull the same trick on their readers. They portray a dystopian world of repressive government and economic decay, and they want you to think it’s our world – either now, or in the very near future if we don’t adopt those authors’ politics.

In reality, these authors’ so-called regular worlds are just as fictional as their utopias. They’re not the product of any real or proposed set of progressive policies. Rather, they’re a pure conservative straw man about what would happen if liberals took power.

The narrative starts:

Another sweltering Denver summer. A faded poster was stapled crookedly to the plywood door of an abandoned fast-food joint at the corner of Colfax and York:

CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
The Secretary of Energy Has Determined That This Unit
Represents An Unjustifiable Expenditure of Our Nation’s
Precious And Dwindling Energy Reserves. DOE 568-90-3041

Smith’s protagonist is Lieutenant Edward W. Bear, known as Win, a detective for the Denver police force. Like a thousand other gumshoes from hardboiled crime fiction, he’s middle-aged, world-weary, bitter and cynical from a long career dealing with the worst of humanity. Also from the handbook of genre cliches, he’s the sole honest man in a world of pervasive corruption, betrayal and violence.

He’s sitting in his car, trying to eat lunch, sick to his stomach from a brutal murder scene he witnessed that morning. Win narrates:

Most of all I longed to take off my sodden jacket, but the public’s supposed to panic at the sight of a shoulder holster. I knew that sweat was eating at the worn, nonregulation Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum jammed into my left armpit. The leather harness was soaked, the dingy elastic cross-strap slowly rasping through the heat rash on the back of my neck.

If it were only—hell, make that five years ago. A man could enjoy a sanitary lunch in an air-conditioned booth. Now, CLOSED BY ORDER signs flapped on half the doors downtown; the other half, it seemed, had been shut by “economic readjustment.” And unlicensed air conditioning was a stiffer rap than hoarding silver.

Like Atlas, TPB begins with the world already in a state of decay, but never circles back to explain how things got to that low point. Like Rand, Smith assumed his intended audience would take this for granted and wouldn’t demand a deeper explanation. Still, it’s fun to pull at the threads of a fictional world and see how it holds up.

Why is there an energy crisis in this world? What’s changed from five years earlier?

Obviously, Smith’s description of energy shortages echoes the real-world 1973 OPEC oil embargo, where Arab states refused to sell petroleum to Western allies of Israel, and then the 1979 oil crisis after the Iranian revolution.

To people who read this book when it came out, those would be recent memories. Americans from that era remember long lines at the pump, skyrocketing prices for gas, painful inflation, and government plans for rationing. However, Smith never says if his timeline went through the same crisis, or if something else happened instead.

Is there an actual energy shortage? Did Smith’s world hit peak oil early and then fail to develop any alternatives to fossil fuel (solar and wind energy don’t exist in this book), resulting in permanent depression because energy really is scarce? Or is there plenty of energy, but no one can get it because the government is hoarding or mismanaging it?

Are the repressive laws a heavy-handed response to a real crisis, or did the government concoct a crisis as an excuse to pass repressive laws? Which answer a libertarian goes for says a lot about their politics. Do they believe socialism is a well-intentioned attempt to help people that inevitably goes bad, or was it only ever an excuse to seize power and impose tyrannical rule?

Smith doesn’t say, but his explanation seems to hew closer to the latter. He believes that government never has done or can do any good for anyone, that it’s always power-hungry tyrants imposing rules on people against their will. In his worldview, “government = evil” is the only thing you need to know. It accounts for everything, so no deeper cause-and-effect explanation is necessary.

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The Probability Broach: Meet L. Neil Smith

Before I begin my review of The Probability Broach, let’s discuss its author: L. Neil Smith (or Lester Neil Smith III, to be more precise).

Smith was born in 1946 in Denver. He died in 2021, but his personal website is still up. I assume a fan or like-minded fellow traveler is paying the hosting bill.

His account of his life mentions:

Neil’s boyhood favorites were Arthur Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, Robert Scheckley, and of course, Robert Heinlein. It was through his interest in science fiction that he encountered the works of Ayn Rand in 1961, when he read Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged and knew he had found the worldview that would guide him the rest of his life. He also recognized the unique way the ideas of Rand and Heinlein compliment each other, and it was this direction he began to take philosophically and politically.

It goes on to detail his involvement in politics:

Neil joined the Libertarian Party in 1972 (serving on the national platform committee in 1977 and 1979) and became a life member of the NRA in 1974. It was in 1972 that he met the great libertarian teacher Robert LeFevre. In 1977, frustrated by the course American politics was taking, Neil began work on a highly polemic science fiction novel, originally titled The Constitution Conspiracy, which he hoped would do the same thing for libertarianism that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for Abolitionism or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the works of H.G. Wells did for socialism.

That book, of course, became The Probability Broach. Smith’s website says it’s “widely considered the definitive libertarian novel”, although it suspiciously neglects to mention who’s doing the considering. It’s also amusing to note that the book won the Prometheus Award, an award for libertarian fiction that was created by… L. Neil Smith.

Even among libertarians, Smith never ascended to the heights of mass popularity. According to his Wikipedia page:

In 1999, Smith announced that he would run for president in 2000 as an independent if his supporters would gather 1,000,000 online petition signatures asking him to run. After failing to achieve even 1,500 signatures, his independent campaign quietly died.

The experience appears to have soured him on politics, as he recounts:

I’ll say it up front: I will no longer be available to anybody as a candidate for any political office.

…the Libertarian Party, which I once regarded as our last, best hope for freedom, now seems irrevocably broken. At best, it wastes the time and energy of thousands of wonderful people. At worst, it’s become a gruesome pit of vermin whose personal psychological and emotional problems drive them to attack anyone who actually does something, instead of arguing purposelessly and endlessly with them about it.

What, you might be wondering, left him so disillusioned and embittered? Well, he tells us: he was ticked off at another Libertarian Party member who accused him of initiating force (a big no-no in libertarian circles), just because he said that politicians who lie to the public should be executed by hanging.

As this interaction hints, Smith spent a great deal of time engaging in that most cherished libertarian pastime: arguing with other libertarians. He said that the Second Amendment should be the Libertarian Party’s “principal – even their only – election issue”. He sneeringly derided libertarians who care about any other issue, or who care about this issue less than he judged they should, as “Nerf libertarians”.

That brings us to the other thing you should know about L. Neil Smith. He was a gun nut – no, a serious gun nut. An essay on the front page of his website says:

If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash—for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.

Smith’s political philosophy can be summed up as: guns everywhere, for everyone, all the time. His ideal world is one where everyone carries deadly weapons at all times. That includes children, as soon as they’re old enough to physically hold one. (This is depicted in The Probability Broach.)

This horrifying fantasy flows from Smith’s anarcho-libertarian ideology. He believes that the state shouldn’t exist; therefore, it’s up to each individual person to protect themselves from evildoers. Or, possibly, the causality goes the other way: he fetishized guns because they made him feel manly, and because of this, he adopted an ideology that gives him an excuse for wanting to carry one around all the time.

Most of Smith’s books were published before the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School that arguably began the modern era of gun massacres. However, he’s certainly old enough to have lived through earlier gun slaughters, like the 1966 University of Texas clock tower massacre.

None of those atrocities dissuaded him from his conviction that guns, guns and more guns are the solution to literally every problem. He can’t appear to perceive any possible downside to selling a machine gun, for cash, to anyone who wants one, with no ID, no background checks, without even asking what they plan to use it for. If mass killings and random shootings were a concern to him, he took pains not to say so.

Smith’s website also features reverent pictures of his personal gun collection, including this incredible line:

I get this piece out first thing in the morning, when I go to the kitchen to make coffee, because most of my other weapons are so cold they hurt my arthritic hands. Guess I could use the Glock for that, as well, but this one just feels good.

Does… he think guns are somehow required for making coffee?

Now you know L. Neil Smith. Next week, we’ll see the anarcho-libertarian literary vision that sprang from his mind, as we dive into The Probability Broach.

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Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: A less crowded future

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the bright side of global population decline.

For most of the 20th century, the world feared the consequences of disastrous overpopulation. Doomsayers predicted famine and ecological collapse as humanity consumed every natural resource. But those fears weren’t born out, because history took a swerve. The birth rate is falling rapidly all over the world, as humanity becomes more educated, women gain more autonomy, and the economy shifts to less labor-heavy professions.

Now doomsayers are raising a brand-new set of fears. However, contrary to those dire forecasts, a less crowded future might not be such a bad thing. It will present its own challenges, but a world with fewer people could bring many unexpected bonuses. It will mean ecological regeneration, fewer wars, more power for workers, and a stronger attitude of loving and cherishing every child, which we should have held all along.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

To keep the population at a steady level, each woman has to have 2.1 children on average. Some countries—especially in sub-Saharan Africa—are still above this replacement rate. But most others, especially wealthy nations like Japan, China, South Korea, and most of Europe, are well below.

As a consequence, the global birth rate is falling. It’s barely above replacement now, and if present trends continue, it will drop below that tipping point soon. Previous forecasts predicted we’d hit this mark in the next several decades. But as new data comes in, it appears it could happen as soon as 2030.

Continue reading on OnlySky…